Kagan

I'm not qualified to talk about Elena Kagan in terms of jurisprudence, so I won't. I haven't really done much research on her politics, but from what I hear nobody really knows much, and while this is a (worthy) subject of much discussion, it's not what I want to talk about since I haven't done what's necessary to discuss it intelligently.

The main thing I feel like commenting on right now is the whisper debate going on regarding her sexual orientation. I have no idea if she's gay or straight. I can understand, I suppose, why some people think that she is. But I'm going to join Digby in saying that what Elena Kagan chooses to say about herself is her truth by right. I don't mean by this that a person can be nominated for a major political office and declaim whatever biography they choose; I mean, rather, that in this case and on this point if she says she's straight, she's straight, and that's good enough for me. Where does anybody else get off saying she's lying or mistaken in this day and age?

I can construct a vaguely reasonable argument for where they get off, of course, and the argument has no doubt been made; but the argument rests on the significance of her hypothetical homosexuality for future decisions on gay rights, and how that significance changes if she is out or not. It does not rest on the fact that she's denied it. I choose to believe her because to do otherwise is patronizing and disrespectful.

I won't lie; I would love it if President Obama would nominate and stand by an openly gay justice. I've been revisiting my favorite show of all time, The West Wing, a great deal lately, and my hunger for a lefty President with the courage of his convictions and a record of wins to back it up remains as real as it was when I was fifteen and convinced I wanted to be Deputy Chief of Staff when I grew up. But as far as I know, Obama's not the guy and this is not the fight I'd love to see. For that matter, this is probably not the universe in which that fight ends as I'd like it to.

Given all that, I have no problem with Elena Kagan other than a certain wistfulness which is certainly not her fault. I wish her a smooth, vigorous, and serious confirmation process and I wish everyone would shut up about why she has no kids and wears her hair short.

Que maravilloso!

Congratulations to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on affirming the legality of gay marriage!

Wow.

Forbes has a list of the 25 most influential liberals in the media up. Reading through it, it becomes pretty clear that their definition of "liberal" is, well, touchy. As far as I can tell, Chris Hitchens is on there solely for not liking Sarah Palin (plus maybe for being an atheist). Seriously, guys, your last sentence in describing the man who loves waterboarding is that he has "supported the war on terror as enthusiastically as he has excoriated Sarah Palin" and he's on your influential liberals list? Not your influential war-supporters-with-self-respect list?

Anyway, it was clear what angle the list was coming from when they referred to Sullivan as viewing "virtually everything through a 'gay' prism" (gay in quotes, huh?) and to Hendrick Hertzberg as "having the purest voice in the choir of the East Coast liberals' 'high church'". Hell, it was clear what angle it was coming from when Chris Matthews made it on.

But what really stopped me dead in my tracks was Rachel Maddow's entry:

The presenter of her own MSNBC show, Maddow, a lesbian, has outpaced Keith Olbermann and other colleagues to attract a cultish following hooked on her blunt outsider's perspective.

It's not the fact that they mentioned she's gay. That's fine. I've mentioned it myself when introducing her, usually in the context of "Squeeeeee!" It's just the way they laid it out there--no particular point, just you ought to know--she likes chicks. In the context of the list I'm pretty sure it stands as a liberal credential, just like Andrew Sullivan being gay, Chris Hitchens being an atheist, etc. She's one of those. Gay people are never conservatives, natch (no, Sullivan, you're on the list too, see?).

It makes me shiver.

There are a lot of people on the list who make sense being there--Maddow, Ezra Klein, Michael Pollan, David Shipley, etc. But there are a lot who don't. I find myself concluding that the editors at work here don't understand "liberal" to mean anything other than liking Obama/disagreeing with Bush, and/or having some characteristics (homosexuality, for example) that Joe the Plumber wouldn't like. There's no sense of policy principles or a basic unity of opinion.

Chris Matthews doesn't like Obama because he's a raging liberal; he likes Obama because he's an intellectually shallow TV journalist whose Pavlovian programming responds well to good TV. I think most liberals would be very unhappy to count Chris Hitchens among their ranks, and I think most of the progressive bloggers I read would be unhappy with much of the list. I know Sullivan is pissed to be on it.

I think this is analogous to the Republicans' general problem: they're not thinking in terms of policy, philosophy, or principles. They're thinking in terms of political maneuvering (supporting Bush or Palin, opposing Obama) and culture wars (oh noez, not an ATHEIST!). As a result, they have nothing to offer but poor sarcasm (seriously, guys, at least be funny) and infighting (okay, that's funny). Sullivan wrote at the end of his defense of his own conservatism:

For the record: self-confident political groupings seek converts - look at Obama. Failed and failing political groupings seek to punish and list heretics.

This is an astute way of looking at what's going on now, and I think that's part of why you see people who I would call odd ducks (Sullivan) or moderates (Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum) being put in the liberal column.

Unexpected, but encouraging

I've been faithfully scanning the news and the blogosphere, but not much has managed to penetrate my fog of illness to generate a response or interest worth blogging about. (Yes, I am both busy with a cappella and sick, now.) However, via Andrew Sullivan, I was surprised to see the Cadets' Choice Award:

WEST POINT — Cadets at the U.S. Military Academy Thursday announced the nominees for the 2nd Annual Cadet Choice Award for the movie character that best exemplifies West Point leadership.

The nominees are:

* Bruce Wayne in “The Dark Knight”
* Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in “Valkyrie”
* Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr. in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”
* John Hancock in “Hancock”
* Harvey Milk in “Milk”
* James Bond in “Quantum of Solace”

“West Point is all about producing leaders of character,” said the cadet public affairs officer Cristin Browne. “Leaders influence people to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. A leader of character seeks to discover the truth, decides what is right, and acts accordingly. Furthermore, West Point values are Duty, Honor, Country. That leadership, those values, are what this award celebrates.”

One of these things is not like the others, hey? I think it's great.

To abandon the "OMG gayz teehee!" angle, I must say I hope that neither Bruce Wayne, Indiana Jones, nor James Bond wins this one. They're badasses, and they're very skilled and, arguably, disciplined, and they're highly successful--but I'd never say they're examples of leadership of any kind. They're lone wolves, all of them. We don't want our commanding officers to be like them. Milk is, in fact, a fine example of a great and honorable leader. I can't speak as to the other two nominees.

Like it's normal or something

Friday Fuck Yeah to HGTV for featuring gay couples on their shows without so much as batting an eye about it.

Milk

I saw Milk and I really liked it. I wish they would have addressed intersectionality a little more. They showed a few gay men of all races and a few lesbians, which is great--they can't change the facts of Milk's inner circle, which was primarily male and white--but every so often you would hear references to "the blacks" and "the asians" as a comparison with or distinction from "the gays" and I wanted to say, "What about the black gays? The asian gays?" etc. etc.

I also understand that intersectionality is complicated and has only gained purchase in feminist thought fairly recently (though it's been around much longer than that--mostly feminists of color have been largely ignored until recently, and even now intersectionality is only current in some circles), let alone in gay activism (which I know far less about), and it's not that I expect Milk himself to have been a paragon in this regard. It's a hard thing to tackle from a political perspective. I don't even know, exactly, what the movie should have done about it--I just sort of thought of all the people who had one part or the other of their identities erased by that formulation, and wished it wasn't so.

The best meditation I've yet heard on Rick Warren's role at the inauguration, from Ta-Nehisi.

Choice

I've been meaning to post this from Ta-Nehisi for a while. I think it speaks for itself.

...The case for/against gay marriage is hung-up on this idea of choice--i.e. we should frown on gay marriage because it's a deviant lifestyle. Or we shouldn't frown on it because it isn't a lifestyle, it's a biological fact. This is where the comparisons with race come in. But I always hated this argument. Whenever people say, "You should not discriminate against people because they didn't chose to be black," I hear the mild tones of wild liberal condescension.

Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?

I'm not trying to minimize the bias and trauma that must come from being out, but a basic extension of humanity, a belief that those who aren't like me actually are like me, says that to be gay has to be more than coping with living beneath the boot of the ignorant. It's always about more than getting your ass kicked, no? What if you actually love the "more than?" What if it is who you are and what you choose?

Homophobia motivating acceptance of transgendered children?

he Atlantic has an interesting article about transgender children which I've been switching off with my homework for reading material. I was struck by these paragraphs:

Catherine Tuerk, who runs the support group for parents in Washington, D.C., started out as an advocate for gay rights after her son came out, in his 20s. She has a theory about why some parents have become so comfortable with the transgender label: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.”

Tuerk believes lingering homophobia is partly responsible for this, and in some cases, she may be right. When Bill [the father of a transgendered child] saw two men kissing at the conference, he said, “That just don’t sit right with me.” In one of Zucker’s case studies, a 17-year-old girl requesting cross-sex hormones tells him, “Doc, to be honest, lesbians make me sick … I want to be normal.” In Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death, but sex-change operations are legal—a way of normalizing aberrant attractions.

Overall, though, Tuerk’s explanation touches on something deeper than latent homophobia: a subconscious strain in American conceptions of childhood. You see it in the hyper-­vigilance about “good touch” and “bad touch.” Or in the banishing of Freud to the realm of the perverse. The culture seems invested in an almost Victorian notion of childhood innocence, leaving no room for sexual volition, even in the far future.

I don't have anything to add, really--I had just never thought of transgender as a comforting (for some) "escape condition" for homosexuality. It dovetails nicely with how focused parents of transgendered children seem to be on the biological rather than environmental explanations. Not saying yes or no particularly--just musing.

"Iraq and the U.S. have reached preliminary agreement to withdraw American forces from Iraqi cities by next June, six years into the increasingly unpopular war, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

That's not breaking or anything, but I figured it's the kind of thing people would want to know if they missed it.

Gaydar may actually exist, which makes me feel like less of a fraud.

Fascinating article on how stained glass windows also purify air. Medieval goldsmiths were also into nanotech, apparently. [H/t Shakesville]


In closing, I finally read Watchmen and it was incredible.

http://punkassblog.com/2008/07/21/and-every-time-i-read-one-i-remember/

That is an absolutely essential post and everyone should read it.

All I can say is, listen to your children (when we all grow up) when they tell you something's wrong.


In other news, this Tennessee tragedy continues to make me sick.

Basically, a bitter man who couldn't get a job, was about to be taken off food stamps, and had been divorced by a woman who attended a particular UU church decided to walk in with a shotgun and just start shooting. He killed a man and a woman, 61 and 60 years old. Some people there said the man protected others with his body.

His stated reasons for doing this were that he hates liberals, who are ruining the country, and gays. (The church had been supportive of LGBTQ members and hosted a sex ed event for teens, among other things).

I hope Karl Rove & Co. are happy. Not because they managed to BLAME TEH LIBERULZ OMG IT HURTZ but because, as always, these divisions are largely imaginary and created; and they are created in rhetoric, in language, advertisements, coded phrasing. Rove's electioneering tactics have been instrumental in furthering this one.

Watch it. Seriously. Then go to hub.witness.org.



I fucking love that it's my job to find these things.

ETA: Marc Jacobs, what the fuck?! I mean, what in the fucking name of fucking fuck is that supposed to mean?